It’s not uncommon to hear a critic dismiss the miracle stories of Jesus by saying, “There may be miracle claims in the stories about Jesus, but there are also miracle claims in other sources. The miracle stories of Jesus are random, flippant and common.”

It is true that there are miracle claims in some other religions. They are found in the Old Testament, apocryphal texts, and in Greco-Roman stories. Yet, such comparisons neglect the uniqueness of the miracle stories of Jesus.

Recently I had the chance to Dr. Craig Blomberg about his book Can We Still Believe in God? While I was aware that comparisons with other religious figures are often overblown, I had previously underestimated the uniqueness of Jesus’ miracle-working behavior.

Why Jesus Performed Miracles

Jesus did perform some miracles out of compassion (e.g., Mark 8:2-3). And sometimes he performed miracles to teach about faith (e.g., Mark 4:40). But the primary theme that emerges from the Gospels is that the miracles of Jesus reveal his identity as the long-awaited Messiah.

Consider two quick examples. In response to the question by John the Baptist as to whether Jesus is the “one who is to come,” Jesus cites various miracles and alludes to Isaiah 35:5-6 and 61:1, which predict the kind of miracles that will accompany the messianic age.

And in the Gospel of John, Jesus announces that he is “the resurrection and the life” and then raises Lazarus on the fourth day in demonstration of the credibility of his astonishing claim (John 11:1-44).

The Pattern Behind the Miracles

The miracles of Jesus are not haphazard, random, or borrowed from other religions. There is a discernible pattern behind his miracles that emerges upon examination. While this passage from Blomberg is longer than I normally cite, it is eye-opening and worth reading carefully.

“What does all this have to do with the credibility of the New Testament miracles? It shows that there are recurrent, discernible, worthy patterns behind Jesus’s miracle-working behavior. When one turns to the later Christian apocrypha or to Jewish and Greco-Roman ‘parallels’ from the years immediately before and after Jesus’s ministry, no such patterns emerge. In fact, no one else has more than a handful of miracles ever attributed to them. In apocryphal texts, later Christians are fancifully imagining what Jesus, the ‘boy wonder,’ might have been like, and filling in other perceived gaps in the earliest Gospels.

The Greco-Roman parallels more often than not are myths about the cycle of the seasons, from the new birth of plant life each spring to its seeming death the following winter. The closest parallels come in ancient Judaism and, of course, before that in the Old Tes